Finding your brand superpower
Adobe interviewed us to get advice on how to find a company’s brand superpower. This is reposted from Adobe Communications Team blog, May 25, 2018:
Brands may be able to find and harness their own unique superpower by aligning their products and services with social initiatives.
“You can’t just say what you are, you have to truly be what you are,” says Shannon Riordan, partner and co-founder of Global Brand Works, a San Francisco-based boutique branding firm. “Your superpower has to be true to what you do. It can’t just be something you put on your home page and then call it a day.”
Brands can and will have different kinds of superpowers: What are the causes that your brand is naturally involved in? How do your brand’s strengths relate to those causes? Are you better equipped to fight deforestation or child exploitation? Hunger or homelessness? There are hundreds of worthy social endeavors; choose one that fits your brand and then make it a core part of the way you do business.
To harness your brand’s superpower, identify where your existing competitive advantages can be leveraged to make a difference and then build your internal culture around making a positive social impact.
“Brands are made of human beings,” Shannon says, “and if you don’t galvanize everyone on the inside, you can’t deliver a differentiated experience on the outside. When you make the change internally, it will emerge naturally out there [in the world].”
Shannon adds that once a company identifies its superpower, it must live it every day in the form of its behaviors, actions, partnerships, and they way it recruits employees and board members. Creating a beautifully articulated superpower is only effective if everyone within the organization understands it and if it becomes part and parcel of the company’s culture, and eventually, its brand reputation.
“If you operate this way, there’s a natural translation to business success,” Shannon says.
Find the full blog post here.